by Desmond Cory
‘You mean like Bev?’
‘No, no, no. I meant like your friend Midge. She doesn’t really know me at all.’
‘Perhaps you inspire confidence,’ Elspeth said.
‘I don’t know why I should.’
‘It’s like I said. You’re clever. And … people like you.’
The Maclennan Professor of Theoretical Physics didn’t, to name but one. But for once that gentleman’s fulminations seemed to be of relatively little importance; it was Annabelle Midgley-Johnson who had now given Dobie food for serious thought. ‘Do you like me?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘That’s good, because I want to ask you a favour.’
‘Me? Sure thing. But what can I do?’
‘When we get back to the Centre, do you think you can get me inside again? Invite me in or something?’
‘I think so. You have to fill in a form thing at the gate and then you can just drive in. No problem.’
‘You don’t have to fill in a form?’
‘Oh no. I live there. No, Bill just checks me in and out, same like with the staff. It’s a lot of nonsense really. But … why do you want to …?’
‘I just want to take a look at some trees.’
‘Trees? Well, we got plenty of those …’
‘It used to be called an arbor-something.’
‘An arboretum, perhaps.’
‘Just a posh name for a wood, I suppose. Though it’s not exactly that. More of an avenue, wouldn’t you say? Of course, the main buildings here used to be some kind of a country house, I forget what it was called but it must have been a nobby sort of place. And there was a path going through the trees up to the side door. Only it’s all grassed over now.’
‘I thought there might be.’
‘Mind you, that’s only what I’ve been told. Dad won’t let me go over there because the inmates are allowed to walk there sometimes. Take exercise and so forth. I s’pose it’s all right for you to go there, though. As you’re a friend of Mr Train’s.’
‘I’m not exactly a friend,’ Dobie said, ‘but I might take a look around all the same. I’m, er … interested in trees. I’ll leave the car parked here, though, if I may.’
Here was directly outside Elspeth’s house, which for once he had been able to find without any difficulty. Elspeth had been right about the porter, or guard, or whatever he was. No problem at all. On the other hand …
‘That’s OK. Dad won’t be back till eight and he wouldn’t mind, anyway. But he likes a bite to eat when he gets in so I’d better go and see what’s in the fridge.’ She glanced back over her shoulder towards the house, a little uneasily, Dobie thought. ‘There wasn’t too much there last time I looked.’
‘You do the cooking?’
‘Nights, yes. Well, somebody has to.’
After a long day at school, that had to be a rather tiring chore. And then there’d be homework to do … This small creature, Dobie thought, seemed to have taken rather a lot on to her shoulders. Girls seemed to know so much more than they used to, nowadays. Beverley Sutro had certainly seemed to know plenty. ‘Well, thank you,’ Dobie said. ‘I’ll run along, then, if I may. Ta-ra for now.’
‘Ciao, baby,’ Elspeth said. Unexpectedly. Dobie turned away. The trees extended in a long unbroken line from the far side of the road towards the main building. They did indeed rather resemble an avenue. Entering their shade (not of course at a run but at an appropriately sedate mathematical pace), Dobie found himself in a sudden near darkness, though patches of a greyish-greenish light showed here and there through the overhanging leaves. It was indeed an arboretum, whatever it looked like; Dobie knew next to nothing about trees, but even he could see at once that the trees around him were of many different varieties. He walked slowly, his footsteps tracing a wandering course to and fro; now and again he paused to reach up and pluck a leaf to examine it more closely. The trouble was that of course unless you were an expert, leaves tend to look pretty much alike.
But then towards the end of the avenue, ‘Ah,’ Dobie said. ‘There you are.’
He snapped off the end of a branch and examined his find cautiously. ‘Eureka,’ Dobie said. ‘Tilia platyphyllos, if I mistake not, Watson. Quia impossibile est.’ But he was almost sure he’d found what he was looking for. Outside those high walls, of course, there was nothing but empty moorland. Plenty of bracken, fern, gorse … But no trees. And this really seemed to be exactly the right shape of leaf, not quite triangular because with rounded edges, a little like the blade of some ancient Iron Age spear or maybe an assegai … Yes, Dobie thought. Most interesting …
At this point his meditations were disturbed by two large gentlemen in white jackets, who bore down upon him purposefully.
‘Nah then, nah then. ’Oo’s that ’idin’ ’imself away be’ind that there moustache? Joe Stalin, are we? Come along then, Comrade Commissar, time for beddy-byes.’
Dobie, briefly flabbergasted, found himself being seized in a firm grip by both elbows and conducted towards the Centre buildings at a rate of knots. ‘No, wait,’ he protested feebly. ‘I think there’s some mistake. I’m not a … an inmate.’
‘Course you’re not, Comrade. Ruler of the Rushun Empire, yus, we know all about that and I can see you’ve ’ad a long tiring day.’
‘No, no. You don’t understand. I’m conducting a criminal investigation.’
‘Oh I see. So ’ow are all the boys in the KGB? We’ll be ’avin’ a bit of a purge there pretty soon, I shouldn’t wonder. That’ll be nice, won’t it? Now just step through ’ere into the Kremlin if you’ll be so kind.’
‘This isn’t the Krem—’
The door closed with a significant-sounding click. Dobie looked around. No, it certainly wasn’t the Kremlin. It looked more like a padded cell. It was a padded cell. Dobie banged his head experimentally against the wall once or twice to see what would happen and when nothing did sat down on the floor. It seemed that what his colleagues at the University had so often sadly presaged had at last occurred. How very extraordinary.
But he realized now that his so-called investigations had been carried out somewhat indiscreetly. He had been, in a word, incautious. Glumly, he regarded the small glass eye of the camera lens that from a point high up on the far wall regarded him back. It was placed, obviously as of design, too high to be reached unless you stood on a table or a chair, and there weren’t any tables or chairs. That was why he was sitting on the floor. And anyway, he didn’t want to reach it. If the surveillance here was as effective as was claimed, someone before long would be peering at a monitor screen and wondering, Who dat down dere? Dobie hoped so, anyway. All this Man in the Iron Mask stuff wasn’t really in his line.
Meanwhile, while awaiting the arrival of the Romney Marsh Mountain Rescue team or its local equivalent, he could conveniently contemplate the recent course of events. This was, at any rate, preferable to thinking about what Kate would say when she got to hear about all this. Possibly, as would almost certainly be the case with young Midgley-Johnson, a certain amount of hush-up and sweep-under-the-carpet might prove to be advisable. Certainly, Dobie thought, I’m not going to tell her. After all, I’m not in this because of Kate. I’m in this, if anything, because of Jenny.
Or because another and even younger woman has been similarly bashed on the boko, and badly beaten up into the bargain. So there has to be a very nasty fellow somewhere about. So it’s no good Kate telling me to mind my own business. It seemed to be the case that Beverley Sutro hadn’t been a very nice girl, but then Jenny hadn’t been very nice, either, if in a different way. Dobie shook his head sadly, pondering once again on the difference.
Two thousand pounds was quite a substantial difference. It could even have been the difference between staying alive and getting dead, if someone hadn’t wanted to pay up. Two thousand, and three thousand to follow. It had to be blackmail, of course. What else?
That’s the difficulty with a permissive democracy. All people are permissi
ve, but some are more permissive than others. Dobie could think of several of his colleagues who had, on occasion, had it off with students who hadn’t been very much older than this Beverley girl, but a very few years can again make a very big difference. Technically, well, all right, she hadn’t been a minor, but undeniably she’d been a schoolgirl and screwing schoolgirls has still to be a little bit off in the minds of many, unless you’re very, very young yourself … but then you wouldn’t be paying two hundred pounds for the dubious privilege, much less two thousand pounds with three more to follow. To follow what? To follow when? Dobie took the folded napkin from his pocket and once again spread out the enclosed sheet of paper. A half sheet, really, hurriedly torn off from a parent notepad; hurriedly torn off and hurriedly scribbled on …
Holiday March 24th £2000. £3000 to follow yet over his head…
One thing about it was certainly very curious. Dobie took another sheet of notepaper from his pocket and compared the two. A university teacher and a student, he thought, is one thing; a doctor and a schoolgirl is another. An old-fashioned and very restrictive profession. You could get yourself struck off the register for that sort of thing, or at the very least dismissed from your post. And right here there were quite a few members of the medical profession conveniently available. Elspeth’s father, for one. Carter, for another …
Or even Morris Train …
Not a doctor, but none the less in a responsible and therefore vulnerable position. Of course, one might be vulnerable for other reasons. A married man, for instance, might have excellent reasons for … hush-up and sweep-under-the-carpet … Dobie sighed. Kate, he thought, she’d kill me. And we’re not even married. This isn’t logic, this is sheer idle speculation. Start out on a list like this one and the list becomes endless. All the same, you have to start somewhere. So why not here?
Really his rescue was being unconscionably delayed. Perhaps he should shout for help or something. What manner of use is it – Dobie wondered crossly – having all these state of the art technowhatsits if they don’t help to rectify these silly little mistakes when they occur? They had to have spent a bomb on them, too. Taxpayer’s money. This was one of the most up-to-the-minute institutes of its kind in the Principality, according to Kate, who after all knew a bit about these things. Yet here he was, stashed away like a kopek or whatever they called them in the bloody Lubianka. Joe Stalin, indeed. There wasn’t the slightest resemblance. And besides …
Ah.
At long last the door was coming open. Dobie rose to his feet. The geezer in the white jacket entered and stepped smartly to one side, permitting the further entrance of Morris Train, who seemed somewhat perturbed.
‘What in Heaven’s name are you doing in here, Professor Dobie?’
‘I think,’ Dobie said, ‘the gentleman to your right has been labouring under a misapprehension as to my true identity. It’s true that I may have inadvertently contributed—’
‘Chattin’ away to a tree ’e woz. I ’eard ’im distink.’
‘I may have unintentionally conveyed an impression—’
‘Nutty I sez to me self. Bleedin’ bonkers.’
‘Possibly open to misinterpretation—’
‘An’ talkin’ in Rushun wot’s more. To someone called Yurika. Well, I arsk you.’
‘Russian? I can’t speak a word of Russian. No, I deny it categorically.’
‘There ’e goes again.’
‘All right, all right, all right,’ Train said, hopping up and down like a boxing referee urging the contestants to abandon a hopelessly non-productive clinch. ‘We’ll go into the rights and wrongs of this matter later, Whyburn. Professor Dobie is known to me personally. If you’d care to step round to my office, Dobie, I think I’ll be able to arrange for you to be spared any further inconvenience.’
‘Obviously a touch of over-zealousness. I hope you’ll feel able to excuse it.’
‘In fact,’ Dobie said, ‘I’m probably to blame. I didn’t realize that I was wandering out of bounds, so to speak.’
‘This whole area, strictly speaking, is out of bounds. You know, our whole external security system is designed to prevent visitors from coming in and not, as you might suppose, to stop people from getting out. That does cause problems. I like to think we have them licked but these occasional little contretemps do occur.’
‘It wasn’t in any way Elspeth’s fault. I ought to make that clear.’
‘No, no. The staff and their dependants are permitted free access, naturally. It’d be difficult to keep them here otherwise, we’re so … isolated, so to speak … but really it’s essential to keep casual visitors well away from the people undergoing treatment here, or else the patients might well be able to supply themselves with dangerous habit-forming drugs, such as the one you’re now holding in your hand, or others a good deal easier to smuggle in … You take my meaning?’
The addictive drug in the glass in Dobie’s hand had indeed done something to mollify his ruffled feelings and he mollified them further before nodding comprehendingly. ‘Yes. And do they in fact?’
‘No, they don’t. On the whole, we find them very co-operative. It’s a matter of not putting temptation in their way. After all, they know that if they keep their noses clean they’ll be out of here within a month – or two at the outside. It is a prison in a sense, but we don’t really have to worry about anyone escaping. There’d be very little point to it. And of course, a certain number of them are here of their own choice. Indeed I’m happy to say that the percentage of voluntary patients has increased very notably of late, thanks to some good work by the local police.’
‘You mean the police persuade them to volunteer?’
‘Oh no.’ Train, unlike Dobie, hadn’t taken a seat but instead was stumping steadily to and fro across the office carpet, his hands folded behind his back in approved military style. Behind the desk, Dobie had observed, a small group of Army officers were indeed glaring at him from a framed regimental photograph, a peak-capped Morris Train being one of their number. ‘Though that may sometimes be the case. No – but they seem to have run a very effective crackdown recently on the local dealers, indeed to have put several of them where they belong. In jail.’
‘So you may expect to see them here in due course.’
‘Well, that’s possible. But,’ Train said, executing a sharp right about-turn, ‘the point is that right now addictive drugs are in very short supply in the Cardiff area. People who’re in any way dependent on them have either to pay prohibitive prices or kick the habit. Well, for quite a few of them the latter is the only viable alternative. One way or another, this Centre is likely to be running just about to capacity over the next few months. Unfortunately it doesn’t look as though the Welsh Office will be granting us any additional financial allocation, but that’s by the way.’
‘But you have quite a few people here who’ve committed criminal offences.’
‘Drug-related offences, yes. That’s so.’
‘Rape?’
‘Rape,’ Train said, ‘is a serious crime, whether committed under the influence of drugs or not. I suppose you’re thinking of that unfortunate girl who …?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know, I had a call from the CID office in Cardiff on that matter this morning, and I felt able to assure the officer concerned that there’s no possibility of any of the patients here being in any way involved. We’re talking about internal security now, you see. And I gather we may also be talking about murder. Well, we haven’t any murderers here, thank goodness. They’d go to a maximum security prison as a matter of course – as the Cardiff police know very well.’
‘You’ve got someone here who has been accused of murder.’
‘We have? Ah.’ After a pause for reflection, Train nodded pontifically. ‘That’s what’s worrying you, is it? Our young friend Adrian. But surely it’s been established that those particular charges were brought in another country and in any case have since been dropped. Otherwise,
he’d hardly be here.’
‘They’ve been dropped but they’re mentioned on the medical record sheet. To which you very kindly gave me access the other day. And I have to presume the police have access also. In which case they might—’
‘My dear chap, these people are under constant surveillance, they’re prisoners after all. And indeed I seem to recollect that in Adrian’s case … But we can easily check on this. It may indeed be wise for me to do so. Let’s step round to the Registry, shallers? It’s only just round the corner.’
‘Here we are,’ Miss Daly said. ‘On Dr Carter’s schedule. Last Saturday, March 24th … 1600 to 1800 hours, Mr Adrian Seymour. Just the usual consultancy period. Wednesdays and Saturdays. That is what you wanted to know?’
Yes, it was. ‘He was with Dr Carter then?’
‘Exactly,’ Train said. ‘Not merely under surveillance, but in Carter’s physical presence. If you wanted an alibi for him, you’ve got it. I take it, Miss Daly, there was no departure from the normal programme that afternoon? Adrian was indeed at that time in Dr Carter’s office?’
‘Oh yes. It’s right next door. I saw them arrive together. And if anything out of the ordinary had taken place, Dr Carter would certainly have reported it.’
Dobie fingered his upper lip with a certain circumspection. ‘Do all the doctors have consultations at that time of day?’
‘Indeed they do,’ Train said. ‘Two o’clock to six o’clock every day. Plus a certain number of group therapy sessions in the mornings. We all work to a very crowded schedule, Professor Dobie, and indeed it’s often difficult to fit everything in. Luckily we have Miss Daly here in charge of the organization of it all. I’m the merest figurehead, I assure you.’
